Are you ready to listen? Are you ready to receive? Are you ready to live in obedience? Let us remember God already knows our heart and He knows if we will obey Him. So, if you are waiting to hear from Him, if you are expecting Him to reveal the secrets of His heart to you, yet you are not totally laid down and have not died to yourself, you may miss what He is saying. He may not speak if your heart is not ready to receive or if you are disobedient. Jesus sees our hearts, every nook and cranny. He knows us better than we know ourselves. If we want God to reveal His secrets to us, we need to be ready to receive and to respond.
Too Busy, too Noisy
Sometimes our lives are so busy and full of noise that we cannot hear what God is saying. I believe that God is speaking to us all the time, but too often we are not tuned in to Him. We have filled our lives with noise. This means it is impossible to hear the voice of God. Many of us have busy lives but we should never be too busy for God. He should be a priority before anything or anyone else. Does listening to God take priority over everything else in our lives? If not, we need to make some changes, make space and quieten the noise so that we can hear Him.
We can be busy with God things, and we can be busy with good things. Let us stop for a second and think about the things that fill our time each day; are they really God things? There may even be some things that we do that are actually not good! If you are too busy and don’t have time for God, something must go. Obviously, the things that are not good should be at the top of the list to be cut out, but also some of the good things may need to go too. It is possible that some of the good things we do are things that God never asked or intended for us to do in the first place.
Seek the Lord and ask Him what needs to go. If you’re anything like me you want to help and do things for other people. You want to be involved in serving at Church, because you are a servant and a doer. This is not a bad thing in itself, but if you are one of these people, it is very easy to say ‘yes’ to things that God never asked you to do, because you want to help and please people.
Many years ago, a friend said to me, “Lorraine, do you know that ‘No’ is an anointed word, you don’t have to say ‘yes’ to everything?” That word from a friend set me free. I realised that just because I was being asked to help, it didn’t mean that I should. I sometimes needed to say ‘no’. I needed to ask God what I was to say ‘yes’ to. I don’t do anything now unless I know that it is something the Lord has said I should do. Stop for a moment and ask the Lord what things you need to stop doing.
Disobedience
It may be that you are not hearing from the Lord because of disobedience in your life. He may have asked you to do something previously and you didn’t do it. If we don’t do the things the Lord requires or asks of us, He may stop speaking to us. He may call someone else to do what He had intended for us to do. Let us be sure to live in obedience and do the things the Lord is asking us to do. Remember the scripture in Luke 16:10:
“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much”
Let us not miss out on the exciting things the Lord has for us because we are not walking in obedience to Him.
